


Take the Pain, Ignite It

by asofthaven



Category: Haikyuu!!
Genre: Character Study, Gen, Light Angst, incidental ennonoya
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-02
Updated: 2015-08-02
Packaged: 2018-04-12 12:29:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,553
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4479299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/asofthaven/pseuds/asofthaven
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>He’s a volatile combination and sometimes he forgets, but mostly Nishinoya’s aware of the threat in his chest, the fact that he is, can be: <i>rowdy, destructive, reckless.</i></p><p>Some days it sounds louder.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Take the Pain, Ignite It

Nishinoya thinks: _we’ll be champions, this time around._

He thinks it because he has to—there are only a few weeks between the start of third year and Inter-High, and Nishinoya doesn’t have the time to think of any other possibilities. 

There’s a lot of space to watch when you’ve declared you’ll watch an entire teams’ back, and Nishinoya knows that no matter how well he can see, he can’t save every ball. But every time the receive goes wild, his body thrums with irritation. The bruises on his forearms are quickly becoming jagged reminders of seeing a ball fall on his side of the net.

He thinks: _Aobajousai._

He thinks: _Shiratorizawa._

He thinks: _Fukurodani._

He thinks: _I have to be better._

It’s an insidious thought that visits him, sometimes—a worry that even on the court where he’s needed, he’s still short of where he needs to be. Expectations and anger collide into a restless energy in his fingertips, a volatile combination bubbling in his veins and on his tongue.

 _He’s_ a volatile combination and sometimes he forgets, but mostly Nishinoya’s aware of the threat in his chest, the fact that he is, can be: _rowdy, destructive, reckless._  


Some days it sounds louder, a dark hum at the back of his mind that echoes in the sound of a ball hitting the ground and the sharpness of his name in a teacher’s mouth and the lull in conversation with friends.

“You’ve been weird today,” Ryuu comments at lunch. He’s munching on his bread like he’s not worried. “You okay?”

Nishinoya frowns, thinking about it.

“Yeah,” he decides, crumpling the remnants of his lunch in his hand to throw away.

“Kay,” Ryuu says with a drawn-out lilt of disbelief. Ryuu’s a lot smarter than anyone ever gives him credit for, and there’s probably no one who can call Nishinoya’s bullshit as easily as Ryuu. “You sure about that?”

Nishinoya’s movements have been clumsy and too big all day, his voice too loud, and his mind too preoccupied with wondering if he’s a nuisance for him to be much sure of anything.

He knows how his moods go, though; the discomfort under his skin will pass, so he shoves it to the side of his mind along with Japanese Literature notes and the memory of what failure feels like.

Nishinoya grins; it feels fragile but genuine. “Nah,” he says, taking the crumpled ball and aiming for the trashcan across the classroom, “but I will be.”

If Ryuu says anything to that, Nishinoya misses it because the wad of trash sails right past the trashcan and hits the person walking into the classroom. It bumps pathetically off their chest before landing quietly at their feet.

Chikara takes a moment to stare at the ball of trash while Nishinoya freezes and Ryuu snickers across from him. Kazuhito and Hisashi are right behind Chikara, looking on with amusement.

“Why.”

It’s like Chikara’s given up on questions and is just speaking his thoughts aloud, to whoever might be listening. Chikara’s put-upon sigh makes guilt worm into Nishinoya’s chest.

“Sorry, Chikara!” he calls, and Chikara doesn’t seem surprised that it was Nishinoya who threw it; Nishinoya wonders if Chikara’s just come to expect those sorts of things from him.

He wonders if everyone has come to expect those sorts of things from him.

“You know how you don’t play basketball?” Chikara settles into the seat next to Nishinoya while Kazuhito drops into the one next to Ryuu, and Hisashi drags a chair over from another desk.

Nishinoya laughs awkwardly. “Sorry!”

He wonders if it’s a bother, his haphazard acts and thoughtless words—and if it is, how much of a bother is it? It makes his chest twist and rumble, makes him hyperaware the way he hates to be.

Someone nudges his arm, and Nishinoya looks up, right into Ryuu’s concerned gaze.

“Nee-san says we can have the TV tonight if you wanna come over,” he says, loud enough that it’s an open invite to the rest of the group. But it’s Nishinoya he’s looking at, and Nishinoya grins wryly—Tanaka’s never been good at subtlety, but it does the job.

Movie nights have always been his favorite anyways.

Chikara shoots down three movie suggestions—Sharknado II was shut down “on principle” even though Nishinoya knows Chikara saw the first one _and_ enjoyed it—before agreeing to come, and Kazuhito agrees on the condition that they stop by the convenience store for popcorn first.

Hisashi agrees because he “lives too close to Tanaka to avoid it”.

Things are properly loud again after that—they fall into conversation easily, and the remaining forty minutes of lunch pass in laughter and loud voices. Nishinoya’s movements are still clumsy and too big, and Chikara has to move his drink several times in order to avoid Nishinoya’s stray limbs.

But it’s calm, like his chest was never thinking of shifting tectonic to begin with, and Ryuu glances at him with a sharp grin in between conversations, as if to ask _feeling better?_

Nishinoya grins in return, raises a fist for Ryuu to bump in an answering _yeah._

 

Nishinoya’s parents aren’t rich, but his aunt is. She’s got two homes, one in Miyagi and one in Tokyo that he has blurry childhood memories of: glittering skyscrapers, neon lights through curtains, the feeling of daring when he stood with his face pressed against the floor-to-ceiling glass in her living room, wondering at the power of being high enough to watch birds take flight from neighboring buildings.

He didn’t know, yet, that there was power in his small body ricocheting forward to stop a ball from falling. He knew what it was to be the smallest in the class and never be taken seriously for it; he knew that when everyone’s gaze was above your head, you had to be loud to be acknowledged, let alone heard.

Twenty stories up with nothing but glass to keep him from falling felt like being heard—it still does, now, and Nishinoya presses the tips of his fingers to the glass, leaning forward. The lights flicker and blink below him, bouncing off of office buildings and steel as he watches.

Back then, he’d been scolded for leaving little fingerprints on the glass and a smudge where his nose had been— _you’re not supposed to touch it, Yuu,_ his aunt had said, yanking him towards the middle of the room where everyone else had gravitated to.

 _Why not?_ he’d asked.

_It’s not meant to be touched, and it’s a pain in the ass to keep cleaning if you do._

Nishinoya didn’t get it then, and it doesn’t make any more sense now, either—his fingers curl against the glass, wondering why you’d put an invitation to invincibility in your house and not expect anyone to get close enough to test it. Seeing Tokyo laid out below him feels like winning does, and he half expects to hear noise from the stands and feel stinging at the back of his hands.

Tokyo makes him think of volleyball; most everything does, in some way or another, so it’s weird to be in Tokyo without the anticipation of an upcoming match. The rest of the team should be two steps behind him, duffels over shoulders and the anticipation of victory in their stride.

Nishinoya feels out of step here now, where the things that matter are the things he doesn’t want to think about—school and grades and futures beyond graduation.

“Yuu,” his mother calls, a disapproving dip to her voice that makes Nishinoya snatch his hand away from the window and glance back at her.

“Yeah?” he asks, taking a step back from the glass.

She gestures for him to come forward. So far, Nishinoya’s managed to avoid conversation with distant cousins and potential business partners disguised as family friends; he already knows the script because he copy-pasts it every time he sees his family, and he’s _tired_ of it.

He isn’t sure what’s worse—the fact that nobody seems to be enjoying themselves or the fact that nobody seems to care that they aren’t enjoying themselves.

Nishinoya takes a few steps back, careful to avoid the small table tucked into the corner; he’s been yelled at twice for nearly toppling over expensive trinkets, and he could do without the cold fury of his aunt.

“Are we gonna leave yet?” he asks, frowning. Ryuu and the others are probably at Chikara’s house right now—they’re always at someone’s house by this time on a Sunday, some combination of the five of them with the occasional other teammates thrown into the mix.

Nishinoya’s pretty sure that if they left now, he’d make it to Chikara’s before everyone left. He’s pretty sure Chikara would let him stay even if everyone else had left—it wasn’t unusual for Nishinoya to stay the night, and the abundance of his forgotten items in Chikara’s house was a testament to that.

Or he could call Ryuu and stay over there—he’s practically a Tanaka at this point, and Nishinoya can’t think of a time he’s been turned away from the Tanaka household.

“No,” his mother says with a twist of her lips—there are important people that she’s supposed to be talking to, Nishinoya knows, but he still doesn’t understand what point there is to having _him_ there. He’s not a kid parent’s show off and he knows it—his saving grace is his athleticism, and that doesn’t amount to much when his family’s big on business and a type of intelligence Nishinoya’s never had.

But his father catches his eye, makes a movement with his head that means _now_ , and Nishinoya takes another reluctant step towards the middle of the room, gaze falling back to the window.

The stretch of Tokyo outside is bright and inviting and alien when he catches sight of himself superimposed over buildings and billboards in a washed-out silhouette.  


Nishinoya doesn’t like seeing the lines of himself dimmed like that.

 

Home is too quiet when Nishinoya’s mother is on a business trip. She’s always been larger than life to him, and the days and weeks without her remind Nishinoya that she’s the one he gets his noise from.

His father is closer to human, if only because he sometimes burns their dinner, and can never remember to remind Nishinoya to iron his uniform—which is fine, because Nishinoya can never remember to actually do it anyways.

Compared to his mother, his father is quiet and normally that isn’t an issue. But his mother has been gone on this trip for two weeks now and his father’s been working late on a project and there’s nothing but a carton of cold take-out waiting for Nishinoya when he gets back from practice.

He pops it in the microwave, plugs his Ipod into the speaker in the living room and turns it up as high as he dares. The noise complaints from their neighbors have started to get back to his parents, and Nishinoya doesn’t want to add another to his name.

Nishinoya kicks back on the couch with his feet propped on the arm, tossing a volleyball towards the ceiling like it’s second nature. The quiet is stifling, even after food and a shower. It’s a buzzing sort of quiet that is louder than the explosions on the TV and the drums from his Ipod and the whirring of his laptop.

Nishinoya’s used to it, he’s _used to it_ , but that never makes it any easier to accept the fact that the air never quite fills his lungs when he’s alone like this.

It’s not noise that he wants, but his fingers are itching for something in the heavy silence; the ball hits his hands with a loud thwack and rolls out of his grip towards the window.

He watches it, but doesn’t bother getting up until the song playing from his speakers ends.

There’s no daring beyond the glass here. There’s no wonder in the dirt he’s known all his life, and he can’t see the ground below the balcony anyways; it’s obscured by other balconies and trees with abandoned nests in the branches.

An abandoned nest—that’s what it feels like, being at home. He’s too big for his skin, the room is too small, and Nishinoya’s never really known what to do with the word lonely.

The music is too loud, suddenly; he’s sure someone’s going to pound on the door and tell him he’s making a ruckus again—again and again, no matter what he does, he makes a ruckus. It’s always too much, even when he tries to tamp it down and keep his emotions in check and his movements close and words in his throat.

He’s too much, he’s _too much_ , and when he shuts off the music with a jab of his finger, Nishinoya’s ears are filled with the whooshing of bubbling blood in his ears.

He doesn’t know he’s going to text Chikara until he does, and Nishinoya has to stare at his phone for a moment, puzzle out why his first thought, in the static that followed the absence of music, was of Chikara.

He’s still puzzling it out when Chikara texts him back. Nishinoya sits with his toes tucked into the couch, the TV still on and his laptop screen blackened at his side while they trade texts for the next few minutes.

Nishinoya doesn’t have an answer, but he does have a thought, and that thought is that somewhere between practice and study sessions and texts, his idea of peaceful became neatly intertwined with Chikara’s existence. It’s unfair, he thinks, because Chikara is his friend, and friends are people, not ideas of states of being.

But Chikara is peaceful; it’s the constant aura of sleepiness around him, maybe, or the fact that he stands in the face of Nishinoya’s haphazard movements with a resignation that feels too warm to be without fondness. And there’s something calming in that, in how Chikara makes him laugh and helps him and doesn’t even look surprised, when Nishinoya shows up at his door fifteen minutes later.

“Hey,” Chikara greets when he opens the door with a yawn, like this is normal and expected behavior. And maybe it is, and Nishinoya just never noticed when it became habitual.

“Hey,” he echoes, following Chikara into the house, peering around the other boy at the sound of one of Chikara’s brothers greeting him.

Chikara’s voice is pleasant and familiar as he leads Nishinoya to his room; the tense energy in Nishinoya’s chest dissipates when he breathes.

Chikara’s younger brothers barge into the room to announce their hunger while Chikara explains, sweet and polite and scary, that he left food on the stove for them and _did you seriously eat it all already?_

It feels like reaching equilibrium, and even when it’s just him and Chikara an hour later, Nishinoya doesn’t feel that balance shift.

It doesn’t take long for Chikara to direct him to the futon, having already asked his mom if it was fine for Nishinoya to stay.

“What if I wasn’t gonna stay over?” Nishinoya asks, smoothing out the edges of the futon with his foot. His bangs fall into his eyes when he looks over at Chikara, and he pushes them out of his face with an impatient flick of his wrist.

Chikara doesn’t look up from the book balanced on his knees. “You always stay over when you come over this late.”

Nishinoya frowns, hands on his hips. “I do?”

Chikara nods, gaze still on his book. Nishinoya abandons the futon to join Chikara on his bed, peers at the book without taking in the text. Chikara moves over to give him more space, but not without raising an inquisitive eyebrow and turning back to his book.

“Does that bug you?”

Chikara glances at him. “What?”

“That I always stay over?”

Chikara gives him a look. “If it did, I wouldn’t let you stay.”

“Your mom is technically the one who lets me stay,” Nishinoya points out.

“In my room,” Chikara says. “I could always let you sleep in the living room.”

“That’d be cruel,” Nishinoya says, holding a hand to his chest. “You couldn’t do that, Chikara!”

He’s fairly certain, at least, that Chikara wouldn’t be that mean. Not unless Nishinoya really messed up, and the closest he’s ever been to that was the one time he nearly broke a vase because he was wrestling with Chikara’s youngest brother.

Nishinoya frowns. “You wouldn’t, would you?” he asks, just to be sure.

“Maybe if you actually end up breaking something,” Chikara says flatly.

Nishinoya pouts. “I’m serious!”

“So am I,” Chikara says, but he looks like he’s suppressing a laugh. “Remember that one time you spilled your hair gel everywhere?”

“That was an accident,” Nishinoya huffs. “I cleaned it up and everything!”

Chikara makes a snorting noise that could be a laugh, but doesn’t say anything else.

Nishinoya butts his head against Chikara’s shoulder, still waiting for his answer. “Chikara!” he whines.

“I’m not going to kick you out of my room,” Chikara concedes. Nishinoya keeps his head against Chikara’s shoulder.

The realization that he’s tired comes in increments, and it’s not until Chikara’s nudges him gently that Nishinoya realizes he was two hundred percent willing to fall asleep tucked against Chikara’s side.

Nishinoya grumbles, thinking that Chikara’s going to tell him to move, but instead Chikara says, “You look like you’re feeling better.”

Nishinoya exhales softly, surprised. It’s a statement, but Nishinoya can tell it’s a question, too. He smiles slightly, says against Chikara’s shoulder, "Yeah, thanks."

He wakes up to Chikara bodily kicking him out of the bed, words a cusp-of-sleep mumble of, “I can’t sleep with your elbow in my ribs, Nishinoya.”

 

Hisashi drops into the space next to Nishinoya during a break at practice, handing Nishinoya a water bottle. Nishinoya takes it gratefully. The sun has been threatening sunburn even through the windows, and with this many bodies in one place, the air is sticky and humid.

“Your spikes were a lot better today,” Nishinoya says after a long swig. Hisashi looks up from his stretch.

“Thanks,” he says with a laugh, “but your libero-in-training still got them no problem.”

“Only half of them,” Nishinoya says stubbornly. Hisashi smiles sheepishly; Nishinoya knows it must be hard to the odd third year out, but Hisashi has seen more time on the court this year.

And he’s still a teammate, still a volleyball player, regardless of whether or not he’s a regular.

“Don’t let your protégé hear you say that,” Hisashi says, sitting up and reaching for his own water bottle. “He’ll be disappointed.”

Nishinoya tilts his head to the side. “Half is better than what Shoyou could do when he started.”

Hisashi snickers. “Yeah, but Hinata’s not trying to replace you.”

Nishinoya glances past the second-years to where the group of first years was seated near Yachi, who looked equal parts flustered and determined as she read something out of her notebook. She’s commanding in a different way than Kiyoko; Yachi is sunshine grins and too many words in too few breaths, but the same determination is in the curl of her fingers at the edge of her notebook.

“He doesn’t need to replace me,” Nishinoya says ardently, “He’s a perfectly good libero on his own!”

“He looks up to you, though,” Hisashi says easily, “He doesn’t want to disappoint you, I think.”

It’s a weird thought, that anyone would look up to him, but Nishinoya can feel a pleased smile working its way onto his face. He stretches his legs, adjusting his kneepads. “He looks up to me?”

Hisashi knocks his water bottle into Nishinoya’s arm lightly, like he can see right through Nishinoya’s attempt at nonchalance.

“Of course he looks up to you,” Hisashi says, “You’re the best libero anywhere.”

There’s no denying the grin now, but years of deflection makes the denials fall out of Nishinoya’s lips anyways, his hand rubbing at the back of his neck. “Tha—that’s. I’m not, I mean…anywhere?”

Hisashi gives him a bemused look. “Yeah, anywhere,” he says. He leans back, still giving Nishinoya that look. “You know, you should really pay more attention to how they talk about you.”

Nishinoya frowns, feeling something unpleasant at his spine. “What d’you mean?”

“They love you,” Hisashi says, waving a hand. Nishinoya feels the unpleasantness settle unexpectedly. “Like, they think you’re really cool.”

Nishinoya puffs his chest, preening. “I _am_ cool.”

Hisashi snorts, a smile almost hidden behind his water bottle. “I’m just saying, you’re not the only one who thinks you’re cool.”

Nishinoya blinks. Several times in quick succession. Hisashi knocks his water bottle into Nishinoya’s arm again, harder.

Slowly, Nishinoya grins.

“D’you think I’m cool, too?”

“I’m pretty sure the only one of us who thinks you’re cool is Tanaka. Maybe Ennoshita, sometimes.”

It’s an obvious joke, and Nishinoya’s chest fills with a warm, trickling relief that turns into a bright laugh. It gets lost in the sounds of squeaking shoes and half-volume shouts, a buzz of energy still filling the room even at the height of mid-practice and tired limbs.

Like this, Nishinoya thinks there might be more to him than a volcanic chest.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes hello do you ever just think about Nishinoya Yuu
> 
> Thank you for reading! Title is taken from "Holding Onto You" by Twenty One Pilots, aka my fav song to listen to while writing Nishinoya. Comments and critiques are especially appreciated!!


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